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Upgrading FCC Broadband Statistics

The NCTA – The Internet & Television Association that represents the large cable companies and telcos has filed a complaint with the FCC asserting that the agency is not updating broadband maps in a timely manner, and this is understating the amount of broadband deployed in the country.

They have a good point, in that the FCC recently released broadband data from 2016 while they already have received June 2017 data. The recently released data is now more than two years behind the actual broadband deployments in the country.

There may have been years in the past where this kind of time delay didn’t make that much difference, but we are now at a time when there are massive amounts of broadband upgrades happening across the country. The big telcos are well into the CAF II upgrades that are upgrading huge swaths of rural America to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. There is a lot of upgrades at smaller telcos that are implementing upgrades from the A-CAM program that requires upgrades to at least 25/3 Mbps – although many of them are upgrading to fiber with gigabit speeds. We now see cable companies starting to implement DOCSIS 3.01 upgrades that can increase their download speeds to a gigabit. And there are numerous overbuilders upgrading broadband all over the place by building fiber or fixed wireless technology. We will soon see the CAF II reverse auctions building yet more rural broadband, with a significant percentage of those upgrades being at 100 Mbps or faster.

This means that the FCC’s broadband maps and the underlying databases are far out of synch and provide the wrong narrative about broadband coverage. The members of NCTA want to get credit for the upgrades they are making, which means that numerous households are no longer considered as unserved, with many of them getting a broadband option for the first time.

There are practical and policy ramifications due to the delay in upgrading the maps. For example, some of the federal loan and grant programs score applicant projects according to whether they are upgrading rural areas that are unserved or underserved – and the FCC data overstates the households that are classified as unserved.

There are also real-life implications for communities. Consider Otter Tail County, Minnesota. Looking at the current FCC maps shows the County with a paltry 2% of households able to get download speeds of 100 Mbps. That is a truthful depiction just looking back a year or two. The cable companies serving the towns in the County have had maximum speeds of no more than 60 Mbps and the rural areas all have broadband using DSL, fixed wireless or satellite.

However, that map doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the County today and what will be happening there in the next few years. Charter has promised to upgrade to faster speeds nationwide and their customers in the County ought to be at speeds far above the 100 Mbps threshold. A lot of the rural areas are served by small telcos that are using A-CAM funding to build fiber. In this past summer alone there were dozens of construction crews building fiber around the County. There are also a few pockets of the County that have gotten upgrades to fiber that were assisted with broadband grants from the State of Minnesota. My quick assessment show that the County will soon have 100 Mbps broadband for 70% to 80% of households when the known upgrades are finished over the next few years. And even most of the areas not getting 100 Mbps broadband will still be seeing speed improvements. That facts on the ground in Otter Tail County paint a drastically different picture than what is shown by the current FCC maps. I have no doubt that this same thing is true in numerous other rural counties.

I understand that the FCC wants to use actual data to create their maps. But I’m mystified why they don’t want to brag about the programs they have sponsored that will improve broadband. It should be easy for them to overlay a map of the expected upgrades that will come from the CAF II and A-Cam programs. These future-looking maps are a better picture of the rural broadband situation.

There are obviously numerous upgrades happening that the FCC can’t know about – they have no way of knowing about upgrades being done with non-FCC funding. But there isn’t much excuse for the FCC to be issuing data and maps that are more than two years out of synch at the date of publication. It’s not a difficult technical challenge to quickly map ISP broadband data as it’s submitted – numerous states already readily create their own versions of these maps. And it shouldn’t be hard for the FCC to create overlays showing the upcoming successes due to the upgrades they have fostered.